tedybear wrote:I think the one I've seen the most here has been people forgetting to hook up the 4 pin p/s lead on the motherboard for the Intel stuff. It's like a magic pill. Hook up that 4 pin lead, and 'magic' everything works.

skydive wrote:Last year I tried to get replace the ribbon cables between the SB 5.1 Live! Digital, the Live Drive and the Digital I/O card with the round silver Akasa IDE cables I use in the rest of the system...

Having replaced the blanked-off connectors with fully usable ones, I turned the system on...

Hey presto! a bang, a burning smell, some smoke and £240 of knackered soundcards. (yes, I know the instructions say not to replace their cable with an IDE, but I wanted to try anyway)

OK, I am dating myself now but, the original PC's (PC,XT, AT, and some 386) had single memory chips that plugged into dip sockets. Plugging them in backwards was a common problem. They usually got hot and eventually smoked.

I remember reading about a guy who called tech support about a problem with his PC, seems the cup holder was broken (CD-ROM tray)

I worked in IT a few years ago and responded to many calls concerning PC's that would not boot, I would show up, eject the floppy disk, hit reboot, and leave. (This was very common).

The best one of all.........a customer had an IBM mainframe installed at their location that would crash almost everyday around the same time. We would show up, scratch our heads, swap a couple memory cards (used core memory that was sensitive to static) and have it up, only to be called in a day or two to do the same thing again.
So, after a couple weeks of total frustration we decided to camp out for a couple days just to watch for the moment of failure. On the second day, around 2pm, we watched as one of the secretaries walked by with 3 or 4 coffee cups to be cleaned out in a sink at the back of the building(she did this everyday about the same time). As she walked by we watched in utter disbelief as the system started crashing, showing memory core problems. It was later determined the nylon stockings she wore produced static charges (ESD and EMI) as she walked by, which effected the core memory and caused the crash.
We fixed the problem by repositioning the system and re-routeing the secretary.

I remember reading about a guy who called tech support about a problem with his PC, seems the cup holder was broken (CD-ROM tray)

Yep...glad to see I was'ent the only one with that customer LOL.

My next door neighbor's kid has about 5 old P/C's that he's picked up from the local Salvation Army store. (his mom works there and gets 'em dirt cheap) He had the guts to bring one of his systems over to me for an eval. Along with a "new" AGP video card he swore was never installed. After a bit of questioning he finally admited that they tried to put the agp card into the PCI slot...and it did'nt fit right. The tell-tale sign was the burned off ground trace all around the agp card.

Lastly he brings me one old relic.....says it boots up and posts...and then craps. Upon looking this over he notes "hummm....why does that part look black?" Turns out his little sister got ticked at him and reversed the power wires..and did some more sabotage causeing a few of the traces to be burned off. (Older systems used to have the power connectors running stright...with the black ground wires 'meeting' at the center...she reversed 'em) I'd love to know how he got it to post...considering the power wires were backwards.

I'm all for people that want to know how stuff works, but for crying in the beer.....READ about it....Before you Play with it.

* Pleading with local supplier to open up shop so I could buy new floppy drive, because other one was faulty would not work so was unable to use Fdisk, put in new one same thing....lightbuld came on, had not checked it was allowed in BIOS after clearing CMOS...old floppy drive now in perfect working order in new recent build

They still don't mark the #1 pin clearly on floppy drives, you have to look for numbers on the PCB.
*Hint: looking at the solder side of the PCB, pin 1 usually has a square pad, the rest have round or oval pads.